Daughter of Death
by The Dream Carrier
Summary: Phoebe Simons didn't really like to come home to see her mom dead because of some stupid, dumb Furie who decided for a tasty afternoon snack while strolling into town. Hades, Phoebe's father, is now trying to raise her in the Underworld and away from all the corruption at Camp Half-Blood. But Phoebe wants to discover the world, not to be stuck in Hades's palace. No flames!


Tears.

Last thing I remembered before my dad took me was the tears. They were salty tears, mingling in with the thin sheet of sweat on my forehead. I mean, I just saw my mom get devoured by a Furie. That was _so _not cool.

I loved my mom. I loved her to death (quite literally, actually). She was the most beautiful, sweetest person in the world. We scraped by (just barely), but at least we weren't homeless. I mean, I never saw many homeless people in Ridgewood, but I remember once there was this old woman on the street praying in Latin with some kind of scarf around her head. Pretty scary, but certainly not my worst memory.

No, it varied from emotional to physical to mental pains. One of the worst pains I ever experienced in my life was when my little brother, Mattie, was run over by a taxi a few years back. He died in the hospital, and I only remember having various blackouts and puking in numerous classrooms at school, home, wherever. I was unstable, so unstable my mom took me to a therapist who suggested I should maybe be put in an asylum.

She didn't, of course. I would've killed her if I would, but I would never know that in a few years I'd never get the chance.

It was a cloudy, rainy evening by the time I walked back home from school. My mom was constantly fretting that I might take a wrong turn in the neighborhood and end up in a deserted alley where a potential kidnapper would try to lure me into following them to a dirty, cramped apartment where they would water-torture me until I went crazy. Of course, that never happened, but that didn't give her any relief.

"Mom?" I called out, my voice ringing in our modest apartment. I'm using the word "modest" lightly, actually. It was a two-room, one-bathroom apartment where the plumbing was living hell and the shouts of neighbors could be heard halfway across the building.

Pleasant, huh?

But anyways, all I got in response to my yell was a short, bloodcurdling scream. Instantly, I knew something was up. My mom was a mild-mannered woman with a passion for quietness and a love for books. She was never nerdy in my eyes, though I'm sure some people would disagree. She never screamed, unless her favorite book was missing, which almost _never _happened. She literally slept with it under her pillow, took it with her to read when we went to the café next to our apartment, practically made a new religion called _Hawking-ism _out of honor of a _Brief History of Time._

"Mom?" I yelled again, rushing into her study. Well, it was technically her bedroom, but she hardly slept on the single bed cramped into the corner. Instead, she moved five bookshelves to her room, lined them against the wall, and put a wooden desk complete with a ruddy spinning chair in one end of the room, and then grandly called it a _study._

But as soon as I got there, tattered paper littered the floor, along with red drops of scarlet blood. The creature chewing on my mom's torso wasn't exactly a reassuring sight, either.

"MOM!?" What was going on?! I didn't have time to contemplate my surroundings, though. I needed to get my mom out of the creature, and _fast. _I grabbed the nearest weapon I could reach: My mom's favorite pen. The creature started to laugh, its voice garbled by my mom's body.

"Silly demigod," It eyed me with disgust. "Your mother is dead, and- you're- NEXT!" It lunged at me. I did the only thing I could do: I stabbed its neck with my pen. It howled in pain, and it quickly staggered away from me. I wasn't done, though. I plunged the bloody pen into its chest, ripping open the flesh, and guts poured out of it like soggy milk. It quickly disintegrated into ash

I staggered back. That was probably the most disturbing sight I ever saw, except for my mom's dead body on the floor.

"Mom?" I held back worried sobs touched her face. It wasn't a pretty sight. Her head was all chewed up, flesh still hanging off of her skull but letting me get a glimpse of the milky white bone on the inside.

My stomach twisted inside of me, and before I knew it barf was flooding out of my mouth. I had an embarrassing tendency to barf while I was sad, and seeing my mom's skull wasn't exactly helping things. Coldness flooded the room, but I didn't look up to try to detect where the coldness was coming from.

_Probably,_ I thought, weeping over my mom's corpse, _my heart._

But it wasn't my heart. When I looked up, there was a death-pale man with slick black hair and cold black eyes that was either those of a genius or a madman, his cloak sweeping all the way to the floor. I saw something disturbing flickering in them, but when I peered closer at it they disappeared. The sight made me vomit even more.

The man watched me with a sad expression on his face, letting his eyes flicker only occasionally to my dead mom strewn onto the floor.

"Phoebe, are you alright?"

The man had an oily voice. I stared at the ground, at the mess I made. Was it that possible to throw up so much? I didn't have much to eat today, even.

"Who in gods' name are you?"

The man smiled, like I said something amusing. "You are correct, even if you mean your Jewish god. I am Hades."

_Hades is the God of the Underworld, master of Death in Greek Mythology. _My droning History teacher's voice flooded my brain, and I quickly scampered away from the man. How was this _possible? _I was Jewish; Orthodox, even. We may've not gone to the temple much, but we celebrated all the Jewish holidays, we knew Hebrew even though we didn't speak it a lot. This man was crazy. That was the only possible explanation.

"You're crazy! How'd you get into my house? W-Why'd you kill my mom?"

"I did no such thing. Nerissa didn't deserve to die the way she did, and I would rather give up immortality than to hurt a hair on her head. I am here to collect you."

"_What?"_

The man rolled his eyes.

"You cannot be brought up at Camp Half-Blood; they'll corrupt you, just like they did with Nico and Bianca. I am going to bring you to the Underworld to raise you properly."

I grabbed the pen I used to kill the monster into one fist and raised it threateningly into his face.

"Don't you _dare _touch me!"

He sighed.

"We'll have to do this the hard way, I suppose." He snapped his fingers. And then I dropped forward as blackness crowded my vision.


End file.
